Verse Around the Neck of Air

AAPL Tree

Overgrown Hops, Livingston Manor, N.Y., July 2016

The least desirable male model in the room.
Che figata! The sweet, sticky, glowing
World fills the artist’s pocket. That claimed room.
It bleats with importance. Vibrates. He reaches down
And finds his hand bleeding.

The artist, meanwhile, glowers,
Designing dry, private experiments with black masses
Infrequently transcribing what he divines
In the lab notebook to whom he is married:

Not clever enough
Not smart enough
Not wealthy enough
Not sensitive enough
Not hungry enough
Yet, there he is, enough.
Still life of the artist without father:

Findings inconclusive and forgotten.
Wrong number. Au gratin.

He intuits something young,
And asks: Why bother taking the test?
He’ll all be dead soon. And all the rest?

Dead and fine. He lines up
In front of the urinal
Panting like a gladiator.

Sad, spineless and the quite-possibly-alive emoji.
The pistol. The butcher’s knife. The optimistic turd. The sword, then.

Send.

Too much sensuality to dissolve
On the tip of the tongue
and him, unable to pay
much attention to anything, if I remember correctly.

John Ashbery loves to astute his assay:
August Kleinzahler adores his ma in Fort Lee:
Czeslaw Milosz, I hope you cherish the artist’s unencumbered flesh,
Decomposing in cubes on the couch
While he Googles for a definite vision of the divine
In an apple tree. (Another fucking apple tree.)